distroless VS docker-socket-proxy

Compare distroless vs docker-socket-proxy and see what are their differences.

distroless

🥑 Language focused docker images, minus the operating system. (by GoogleContainerTools)

docker-socket-proxy

Proxy over your Docker socket to restrict which requests it accepts (by Tecnativa)
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distroless docker-socket-proxy
122 23
17,487 1,160
2.0% 6.3%
9.3 5.3
6 days ago 8 days ago
Starlark Python
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

distroless

Posts with mentions or reviews of distroless. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-14.
  • Chainguard Images now available on Docker Hub
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Mar 2024
    lots of questions here regarding what this product is. I guess i can provide some information for the context, from a perspective of an outside contributor.

    Chainguard Images is a set of hardened container images.

    They were built by the original team that brought you Google's Distroless (https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless)

    However, there were few problems with Distroless:

    1. distroless were based on Debian - which in turn, limited to Debian's release cadence for fixing CVE.

    2. distroless is using bazelbuild, which is not exactly easy to contrib, customize, etc...

    3. distroless images are hard to extend.

    Chainguard built a new "undistro" OS for container workload, named Wolfi, using their OSS projects like melange (for packaging pkgs) and apko (for building images).

    The idea is (from my understanding) is that

    1. You don't have to rely on upstream to cut a release. Chainguard will be doing that, with lots of automation & guardrails in placed. This allow them to fix vulnerabilties extremely fast.

  • Long Term Ownership of an Event-Driven System
    4 projects | dev.to | 2 Oct 2023
    The same as our code dependencies, container updates can include security patches and bug fixes and improvements. However, they can also include breaking changes and it is crucial you test them thoroughly before putting them into production. Wherever possible, I recommend using the distroless base image which will drastically reduce both your image size, your risk vector, and therefore your maintenance version going forward.
  • Minimizing Nuxt 3 Docker Images
    2 projects | dev.to | 5 Aug 2023
    # Use a large Node.js base image to build the application and name it "build" FROM node:18-alpine as build WORKDIR /app # Copy the package.json and package-lock.json files into the working directory before copying the rest of the files # This will cache the dependencies and speed up subsequent builds if the dependencies don't change COPY package*.json /app # You might want to use yarn or pnpm instead RUN npm install COPY . /app RUN npm run build # Instead of using a node:18-alpine image, we are using a distroless image. These are provided by google: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless FROM gcr.io/distroless/nodejs:18 as prod WORKDIR /app # Copy the built application from the "build" image into the "prod" image COPY --from=build /app/.output /app/.output # Since this image only contains node.js, we do not need to specify the node command and simply pass the path to the index.mjs file! CMD ["/app/.output/server/index.mjs"]
  • Build Your Own Docker with Linux Namespaces, Cgroups, and Chroot
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jun 2023
    Lots of examples without the entire OS as other comments mention, an example would be Googles distroless[0]

    [0]: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless

  • Reddit temporarily ban subreddit and user advertising rival self-hosted platform (Lemmy)
    2 projects | /r/selfhosted | 7 Jun 2023
    Docker doesn't do this all the time. Distroless Docker containers are relatively common. https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless
  • Why elixir over Golang
    10 projects | /r/elixir | 29 May 2023
    Deployment: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless
  • Reviews
    3 projects | /r/golang | 17 May 2023
    Or use distroless image as it includes one, among others. https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless/blob/main/base/README.md
  • MRSK: Deploy Web Apps Anywhere
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Apr 2023
    I find Docker running a full Linux userspace a little bloated. Thankfully there are distroless base images(https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless). Haven't done service dev in a while, so I don't really have experience with this, but it looks promising.
  • Is it ok not to be able to run application locally?
    6 projects | /r/golang | 27 Apr 2023
    One of the things we did that helped was to use Go for fast builds, and then we build our binary into Google’s distroless base container image. This makes really tiny images (like 20-30MB images) so uploading the container images to our container repository and deploying to our dev K8S cluster is super fast! This helps make deploys fast.
  • Fearless Distroless
    3 projects | dev.to | 20 Apr 2023
    -- "Distroless" Container Images

docker-socket-proxy

Posts with mentions or reviews of docker-socket-proxy. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-05.
  • Security for your Homeserver
    4 projects | /r/selfhosted | 5 May 2023
    I just found this the other day. You might be interested I haven't done myself yet https://github.com/Tecnativa/docker-socket-proxy
  • Gitea 1.19.0 released - now with support for Actions
    2 projects | /r/selfhosted | 20 Mar 2023
    I think you could provide access to the socket using a "docker-socket-proxy" container. It allows other containers to access the docker socket, you can even control which actions are allowed and which are not. You can use a bridge network for the communication to the socket-proxy container, so the socket-proxy container does not need to map/expose any ports. In the other container you need to set the "DOCKER_HOST" env variable accordingly, e.g. "DOCKER_HOST=tcp://mydockersockerproxycontainer:2375". https://github.com/Tecnativa/docker-socket-proxy
  • Is there any docker dashboard that auto detect the services ?
    5 projects | /r/selfhosted | 8 Sep 2022
    May be not necessarily: https://github.com/Tecnativa/docker-socket-proxy
  • Basic Traefik configuration tutorial
    4 projects | dev.to | 12 Feb 2022
    version: "3.7" services: traefik: image: traefik:v2.6 command: # Entrypoints configuration - --entrypoints.web.address=:80 # Docker provider configuration - --providers.docker=true # Makes sure that services have to explicitly direct Traefik to expose them - --providers.docker.exposedbydefault=false # Use the secure docker socket proxy - --providers.docker.endpoint=tcp://socket_proxy:2375 # Default docker network to use for connections to all containers - --providers.docker.network=traefik_public # Logging levels are DEBUG, PANIC, FATAL, ERROR, WARN, and INFO. - --log.level=info ports: - 80:80 networks: - traefik_public - socket_proxy restart: unless-stopped depends_on: - socket_proxy # https://github.com/traefik/whoami whoami: image: traefik/whoami:v1.7.1 labels: # Explicitly instruct Traefik to expose this service - traefik.enable=true # Router configuration ## Listen to the `web` entrypoint - traefik.http.routers.whoami_route.entrypoints=web ## Rule based on the Host of the request - traefik.http.routers.whoami_route.rule=Host(`whoami.karvounis.tutorial`) - traefik.http.routers.whoami_route.service=whoami_service # Service configuration ## 80 is the port that the whoami container is listening to - traefik.http.services.whoami_service.loadbalancer.server.port=80 networks: - traefik_public # https://github.com/Tecnativa/docker-socket-proxy # Security-enhanced proxy for the Docker Socket socket_proxy: image: tecnativa/docker-socket-proxy:latest restart: unless-stopped environment: NETWORKS: 1 SERVICES: 1 CONTAINERS: 1 TASKS: 1 volumes: - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro networks: - socket_proxy networks: traefik_public: external: true socket_proxy: external: true
  • Traefik Docker Protector
    2 projects | /r/docker | 20 Jan 2022
    tecnativa's docker-socket-proxy does roughly the same thing but can be used for any container that requires access to the Docker socket.
  • How to properly secure the server?
    5 projects | /r/selfhosted | 16 Nov 2021
  • Monitoring app releases and updates..
    3 projects | /r/selfhosted | 20 Oct 2021
    Have you checked-out any socket proxies? Instead of exposing the socket though a volume, it’s done through the local docker network through the proxy container. This allows you to enable/disable access to the socket API using environmental variables. This is the image I’m using: https://github.com/Tecnativa/docker-socket-proxy
  • Worry for Synology?
    2 projects | /r/synology | 5 Jul 2021
    Docker’s root privileges are only a problem if you grant your container unrestricted access to the docker socket /var/run/docker.sock. For containers that need it, there are strategies to limit access only to the APIs that the container actually needs by using the docker-socket-proxy.
  • How to begin with Docker if I want the best security for my websites?
    3 projects | /r/docker | 16 May 2021
  • This is why I don't blindly suggest people to selfhost their Bitwarden account. Unless: 1. You are experienced and know what you are doing 2. You have time to setup and maintain it 3. You have your own trusted people to maintain it
    2 projects | /r/Bitwarden | 15 May 2021
    I wish more people understood this. You may be interested in https://github.com/Tecnativa/docker-socket-proxy.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing distroless and docker-socket-proxy you can also consider the following projects:

watchtower - A process for automating Docker container base image updates.

wireguard-ui - Wireguard web interface

Diun - Receive notifications when an image is updated on a Docker registry

iron-alpine - Hardened alpine linux baseimage for Docker.

spring-boot-jib - This project is about Containerizing a Spring Boot Application With Jib

cadvisor - Analyzes resource usage and performance characteristics of running containers.

docker - â›´ Docker image of Nextcloud

jib - 🏗 Build container images for your Java applications.

podman - Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.

dockerfiles - Various Dockerfiles I use on the desktop and on servers.

flap

docker-alpine - Official Alpine Linux Docker image. Win at minimalism!